This week, the Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra is proposing a new guided tour of the exhibition “INFLUENCERS in art. From Van Goyen to Pop Art”.
Today we invite you to discover “The Valley of Artuby” c. 1924 by the artist Josep de Togores. Work that is part of the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza collection and that you can listen to from home.
From a wealthy and intellectual family, Josep de Togores developed a great sensitivity for drawing and painting. Deaf at the age of thirteen due to meningitis, he began his artistic training with the master Joan Llaverias and later traveled to Paris thanks to a scholarship from Barcelona City Council.
The successive stays in Paris allowed Togores to contact with the work of Paul Cézanne and begin an impressionist stage, combining painting with art criticism. Catalan Noucentisme will also influence Togores’ painting and gradually move away from Impressionist procedures, to pay more attention to the line, volume and materiality of objects.
Although the experimentation of Togores, promoted by a certain disillusionment with the landscape, was not properly understood in Catalonia, as it moves away from the tradition of rural landscaping, its relationship with artists such as Georges Braque, Modigliani, Aristides Maillol, Max Jacob or Picasso, will mark the direction of Togores, who will seek his own artistic voice exploring different styles such as Cubism, the new German objectivity or the movement of Italian plasticity.
Precisely, the work “The Valley of Artuby”, must be contextualized in the antithesis of pleinairism and corresponds to the series of landscapes of the French region of the Var, where Togores reflects a moment of crisis in his life.
It is a painting that, despite its apparent arbitrariness, has been studied by the artist, who composes the landscape as a cubist-rooted structure with two crossed diagonals. In the work, the colors do not seek to be true to reality, but use a subtle range that goes from gray to green and forces the viewer to move smoothly between the shapes of the landscape.
